In a blog post at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg recalls a meeting he had with Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas leader recently killed during Operation Cast Lead.

I saw him last in Gaza two years ago, at a mosque in the Jabalya Refugee Camp … He was one of the more Islamically-learned Hamas leaders I’ve met … In particular, Rayyan was interested in the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, with a special interest in hadith that painted Jews in a negative light.

And what did this learned Hamas leader have to say?

This is what he said when I asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (or cease-fire) with Israel: “The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don’t need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel.” There is no chance, he said, that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. “Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do (and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do) that Jews are the “sons of pigs and apes.” He gave me an interesting answer that reflects a myopic reading of the Koran. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce. So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”

What are our crimes? I asked Rayyan. “You are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah,” he said. “Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God.”

And here’s some more on Rayyan from the BBC:

“We will never recognise Israel,” he told Reuters news agency in early 2007. “There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination.”

[...]

When Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007, he said there would be no dialogue with Fatah, the secular Palestinian movement it ousted, “only the sword and the rifle”.

Operation Cast Lead was launched to combat men like Rayyan, someone who drew his inspiration not simply from injustices against Palestinians but from an extreme and vitriolic form of Islamist theology, a man for whom hatred of Jews was a duty to God, and a man who presented not simply Israel itself, but the Jewish people as a whole throughout history as ‘cursed’ enemies.

Nizar Rayyan is a reminder of exactly what Israel is up against in its fight against Hamas, a group that puts out TV shows aimed at indoctrinating children with ideas of anti-Jewish genocide:

And a group whose ideology promotes a hateful and supremacist version of Islam:

Those who delude themselves that Hamas is simply a ‘resistance movement’ would do well to listen to the words of Nizar Rayyan and to take seriously the real message being promoted by Hamas, a message that presents cease-fires as re-arming periods and which proclaims the long-term existence of Israel to be ‘an impossibility’.

I know, I promised fifty, but this is hard. The list might very well grow to fifty -- keep your suggestions coming -- but for now, here are twenty-five top philo-Semites. A couple of notes: I did not include Kabbalah goofballs such as Madonna, despite demands from numerous readers. More seriously, I did not include Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who saved Jews during the Shoah. That is a special category that represents something much greater than simple affinity for,  and support of, Jews. Some of you might question the presence of Malcolm Gladwell on the list; he is there because he is the greatest philo-Semite I know personally; because he introduced me to my wife, with whom I have had numerous baby Jews; and because he inspired this list.

To read the full list, click through to Jeff's Atlantic blog.

I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is  quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him: 

   A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

 

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

A hero of mine is the Ha'aretz reporter Avi Issacharoff, who, with other journalists, stopped a Jewish pogrom against innocent Palestinians in Hebron. His harrowing report is here, and Dion Nissenbaum has more detail.

I've written about these Hebron settlers before, and have catalogued their extremism. But it needs to be said over and over again: They are a disgrace to Judaism. As the late, great Rabin said of Baruch Goldstein and his degenerate supporters: "You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law. You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism."

The nominations for the Philo-Semite 50 keep pouring over the transom, and the Sanhedrin is compiling the list. But I'll post some particularly interesting nominations as they come in. I suggested last week that readers stop proposing both Jon Voight and Rashid Khalidi (two great tastes that taste great together) for admission. I should have included Madonna on that list, though Goldblog reader Mitch Ginsburg made the case: "I know she's not exactly the second coming of the Ari, but she's nothing if not devoted to Kabbalah."

Yeah, no.

Monica Osborne, a smarty-pants Jewish-American literature expert at UCLA wrote in to say, "Well, of course, Maurice Blanchot should be on this list! (French philosopher, close friend of Jewish-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; Blanchot said that 'Judaism is an essential modality of all that is human.')" She described him as her "favorite wanna-be Jew of all time." I'll feed Blanchot's name into the Philo-Semite UNIVAC as well.

Reader D. Shapiro wrote to say, "If you're placing Truman that high up, I sure hope you include the original King Cyrus (who, come to think of it, could teach Ahmadinejad a thing or two about how to get along with us)." Shapiro also nominates Denis Leary:

I'm not the greatest fan of Chabad in the world, in particular its Christological, maybe-the-Rebbe's-not-dead streak, and its general fundamentalist, women-marginalizing outlook, but this is a group that does, in fact, try to spread a kind of happiness wherever it plants itself. And it plants itself everywhere. It puts other Jewish groups to shame, in fact, by its ebullient outreach. My friend Esther Abramowitz wrote to note that the "Chabad rabbi and his wife have welcomed and celebrated with thousands upon thousands of traveling Israelis with joy and no judgment."  That's the formula, and it's a formula that works.

What happened in Mumbai was a horror. We're now learning that the people in the Chabad house were subjected to special tortures, but even if they were murdered quickly, they were still murdered, and they were murdered for the crime of being Jewish. It's astonishing to think that Pakistani-supported terrorists, obsessed with the alleged crimes of Hindu India, would go out of their way to murder a group of people who couldn't find Kashmir on a map. But the Jews are a cosmological enemy. I think we've learned that by now. 

So, as you have undoubtedly heard, the Forward has chosen me as one of its 50 most influential American Jews. Me, Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Silverman, and Lipa Schmeltzer, among others.

This honor has changed my life, especially the magnificent gift of 1,000 shares of AIG stock from the finance committee of the Elders of Zion. It has also caused heartache. Friends are envious, even non-Jewish friends. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell is very upset. When we were roommates a very long time ago, Malcolm used to listen to the klezmer stylings of Giora Feidman on his record player. He is, in other words, very Jewy. He is also deeply wounded. "I am so jealous," he wrote. "Shouldn't there be a parallel list for wanna-bes?"

Yes, there should. If the Forward can publish a list of the top 50 Jews, then Goldblog can publish a list of the top 50 philo-Semites. I don't have a philosophical problem with this, by the way: I dissent from the line, first passed on to me by Frank Foer, who, tragically, is not a top-50 Jew (though his mother is!), that philo-Semites are anti-Semites who like Jews. So, a list, and one loyal readers can help me assemble. I already asked Malcolm to provide me names of other philo-Semites, but he said: "How do I know philo-Semites? I'm such a philo-Semite I only associate with the real thing."

Here are a few names, just to get us going:

1) George Eliot
2) Barack Obama
3) Harry Truman
4) Emile Zola
5) Malcolm Gladwell

Please send your entries to Goldberg.atlantic@gmail.com, and I'll post them as they come in. 

Daniel Levy, the director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation (which is run by a blogger, it should be noted) and the director of the Prospects for Peace initiative at the Century Foundation, is one of the smartest analysts of the Middle East conflict in Washington, or anywhere else. He often veers too left for my taste (on only one occasion, I believe, I veered too left for his taste), but he's a rigorous thinker and is steeped in the painful and complicated details of the ongoing crisis. Levy, who keeps his own blog, of course, has been a player in negotiations through the 1990s, and brings real-world experience -- and real Israeli experience -- to the conversation. As we enter the Obama era, it seemed worthwhile to send Levy some questions:

Jeffrey Goldberg:  Are you a Zionist?

Daniel Levy: The answer is a yes, albeit a more complex yes than I'd like it to be.  I would describe myself as a Zionist on at least three levels.  First, and at the most practical level, having made aliyah to Israel from the U.K., taken up citizenship, and made my life there, my Zionism meets the more classical and exclusionary definitions.  Second, I do consider the Jews to be a people, and support that people's right to self-determination in a nation-state, Israel.  Finally, and in many ways derived from both of the above, I consider Israel to be central to my own Jewishness and my identity--more than a religious affiliation, it's a national and cultural affiliation to modern Israel, the language, to Tel Aviv, etc.

Where it gets complex is this--sixty years after the establishment of the state, and alongside all its accomplishments, the onus is now on Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism, to demonstrate in practice that it can be non-expansionist in territorial terms toward its neighbors, and that it can confer genuine equality on the non-Jewish citizens of the state.  Most troubling of course is that for more than two-thirds of its existence, Israel has imposed a hostile occupation on another people, the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and to be blunt, that occupation will have to end for Israel to survive.  To the extent to which a Zionist narrative has been used to drive forward and justify the post-'67 settlement enterprise (and the discrimination within Israel), it is a Zionism that actually works against the interests of Israel, and not, of course, the Zionism that I am signing up for.

JG: You write about the occupation in a way that suggests you believe it was Israel's fault from the outset.  Whose fault do you believe it is?  Put another way, do you think the Khartoum declaration of late 1967--the so-called three noes--set the stage for the tragedy that followed, or is it not relevant?


DL: The Khartoum noes represent a more complex issue than is often assumed.  The setting is, of course, after the '67 war, with Israel in control of vast swaths of Egyptian and Syrian territory, as well as the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.  Israel expresses a readiness to talk peace and understandably interprets the three noes of Khartoum as, well, being a negative answer.  But historians suggest it wasn't that simple.  See this long quote below from pages 258-259 of Avi Shlaim's book The Iron Wall:

"Israel's leaders watched with keen anticipation to see what conclusions the Arab leaders would draw from their military defeat.  The conference ended with the adoption of the famous three noes of Khartoum: no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel.  On the face of it these declarations showed no sign of readiness for compromise, and this is how Israel interpreted them.  In fact, the conference was a victory for the Arab moderates who argued for trying to obtain the withdrawal of Israeli forces by political rather than military means.  Arab spokesmen interpreted the Khartoum declarations to mean no formal peace treaty, but not a rejection of a state of peace; no direct negotiations, but not a refusal to talk through third parties; and no de jure recognition of Israel, but acceptance of its existence as a state.  President Nasser and King Hussein set the tone at the summit and made it clear subsequently that they were prepared to go much further than ever before toward a settlement with Israel.  At Khartoum, Nasser and Hussein reached a genuine understanding and formed a united front against the hard-liners...The Khartoum summit thus marked a real turning point in Nasser's attitude to Israel.  At Khartoum, Nasser advised, and indeed urged, King Hussein to explore the possibility of a peaceful settlement with Israel.  This was, of course, not known in Israel at the time.  As far as Israel was concerned, the Khartoum declarations closed every door and every window that might lead to a peace settlement.  On October 17 the cabinet took a decision that amounted to an official cancellation of the decision of 19 June."

The famous three noes are explained as being an opening position and that Jordanian King Hussein actually had something of a mandate from Nasser's Egypt to begin exploratory talks with Israel.  We know those took place.  We also now know that Egypt itself was putting out peace feelers prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  In the end, of course, that Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was reached, but only after another needless war--something that might unfortunately be repeated with Syria now.

But here's the bigger picture: the UN in 1947 in UNGAR 181 calls for a division of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state according to a territorial ratio of approximately 55 percent to 45 percent.  After the War of Independence, Israel is in control of not 55, but 78 percent of the land, and builds its state in that area.  After the '67 war, Israel controls 100 percent.  I would argue that Israel's big achievement today is that we have reached a situation where the Arab world is saying yes to the 1949-67 division of 78:22--not the 1947 plan, but also not one centimeter more than the '67 lines.  Some may argue that if Israel already got a yes to 78 percent, we can surely get it to 80 percent, or 85 percent, or even more--I think that is neither realistic nor desirable, and in attempting to achieve it, we are liable to commit national suicide.

So my bottom line is that Israel needs to take yes for an answer, which means ending the occupation. And let's face it, the fact that the occupation is so entrenched, especially the civilian settlements and their supportive infrastructure--none of that can be considered a sensible or legitimate response even to the traditional interpretation of the Khartoum noes.  Does it justify Palestinian violence?  No.  Is the post-'67 settlement enterprise a huge mistake for the Zionist project and an albatross around the neck of Israel?  Absolutely yes.
We can argue about the history, but the imperative today is to seize the opportunity to entrench the '67 borders, a two-state reality, and to end the occupation (with agreed, minor, and mutual land swaps involving the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but respecting the 78:22 principle).

JG: Man, you know nothing turns me on more than long quotations from Avi Shlaim.  There's an unbiased observer for you.  Anyway, next question: Who's to blame today?  Or put another way, why is the process so locked-down right now: Israeli political paralysis, Palestinian religious extremism, the continued presence of settlements in the West Bank, American disinterest, all of the above?

DL: In answer to your latest delightful question, I'm not too keen on playing the blame game.  I could agree to all of the reasons you gave and add lots more.  But I think we need to get beyond who is to blame and to think constructively and creatively about how to get out of this mess.  The situation is not good.  Neither Israelis nor Palestinians benefit, and while scoring points can always be fun, it doesn't get us very far.  In fact, I would even say that blame is secondary to a bigger problem which is that we are locked into a process that is increasingly incapable of delivering--and we need to recognize that.

I would suggest that there are two basic design faults to what we call the peace process, whether that be Oslo or Annapolis or everything in between.  One, the two parties have gone about as far as they're going to go to finding solutions in bilateral negotiations.  What is left to do--the final points of closure on core issues--is obviously the hardest bit, and I don't think the parties can do that alone, especially not with the current leaderships one both sides.  There is almost a perverse incentive at work to postpone hard decisions and to negotiate indefinitely--that is the path of least resistance in terms of domestic politics for Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Two, the Palestinians are expected to successfully build their own economy, security forces and institutions of governance while in a pre-state condition of pervasive foreign (Israel) occupation that includes an expanding civilian settler population--that needs to be protected by the IDF.  The idea is that the Palestinians prove themselves and then Israel makes progress--it has not and cannot work that way.

So both sides are struck.  The process suffers from the laws of diminishing returns as we keep trying this failed and flawed method and it does no favors to Israel as it creates circumstances in which we are unable to extract ourselves from a predicament which severely damages our interests.  I would suggest that what we need now is effective external intervention to break this impasse, and realistically this would have to be U.S.-led.

JG: Okay, external intervention is needed.  What, exactly, does President Obama do?  How does he get the Israelis to remove settlements?  How does he strengthen the PA and marginalize Gaza?

DL: To an extent, it does depend on what kind of an Israeli government an Obama presidency is working with.  If the Israeli leadership at the time is not clear in its willingness to remove settlements, withdraw on the West Bank, and implement a two-state solution, then I would recommend not investing in a peace process just for appearances' sake.  Such a process would, after all, not succeed, further undermining both hope and credibility, and the last thing we need is another failed process.  Under such circumstances--and most people will assume that this is the scenario of a Netanyahu premiership (although I'd at least test the proposition that Netanyahu can be a pragmatist after all)--I would suggest that the Obama administration makes its explicit declarative intention as being to keep the two-state option alive and viable.  That means focusing on preventing new settlements, outposts, and settlement-expansion (and also on allowing the Palestinians to reconstitute a reformed PLO and Palestinian national movement).  A singular American focus on settlements--and that can be lots of talking and monitoring and upbraiding, it doesn't have to be linking aid--can have a fascinating, liberating, and even decisive impact on the internal Israeli debate about settlements.  The Obamaites could also ask Bill Clinton a thing or two about handling Netanyahu, as he played no minor role in Netanyahu's first term as PM being cut short to barely 30 months.
 
JG: Over the next four years, what are the chances that we'll see another Arab-Israeli war, in either Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank?

DL: Unfortunately, the chances of another war are not insignificant, although there is no inevitability to there being further war and if we act smart this outcome can be avoided.  However, if one looks at the trajectory of hostility to Israel, instability in the region, and misguided Israeli policies, then that makes for a worrying trend line.

Joe Klein, in his response to my earlier post, cedes the point I make about the misuse of the term "anti-Semitism," and I'm grateful for that, and I'm grateful that he's out there selling my book (there's no better way to soften a writer's heart than to praise his books, except maybe handing over cash money). But Joe goes on to say that I'm "truly foolish" for writing the following:

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble.

This is his response to my statement:

No, Jeff, I don't derive great pleasure from it. I'm pretty anguished about it. As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country. Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war. For people like Doug Feith et al, their Jewish identity--their ethnic nationalism, not the religious part of it--had an awful lot to do with their plumping for war with Iraq and, more recently, Iran. Feith et al advised Binyamin Netanyahu, in a paper called "A Clean Break," to go to war with Iraq when he was Prime Minister in order to protect Israel. I find the conflation, by some Jewish neoconservatives, of Israel's interests and America's--and their truly dangerous misreading of both--to be appalling. But much worse is their rush to pin the tag of anti-Semitism on anyone who disagrees with them, including me.

 

There is much to unpack here. First, there is Joes's assertion that Bush's Christianity has "nothing to do" with his push for war. I think this will surprise a lot of people, including George W. Bush. Second, I think Joe is essentializing, to employ an unwieldy term, the Jews who supported the war. There's no denying - nor should it be denied - that American Jews, and American Christians as well, worry about Israel's security. (That Christian bit is important, by the way; I know this drives Mearsheimer and Walt crazy - and I know that Joe is no Mearsheimerite - but polls show the majority of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, despite the best efforts of the Mearsheimers and Walts of this country to blame Israel for America's woes. No Jewish lobby would be powerful enough to influence American foreign policy if it worked in opposition to the feelings of a majority of Americans.)

I think Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, were worried about Saddam Hussein for many reasons, including and especially his record of genocide, and I think that many advocates of the war, myself included, were eager to see Saddam overthrown because he was a uniquely evil figure on the world stage. And if the Jewish advocates for the defeat of Saddam argued the way they did because they were sensitized to the issue of genocide by the Holocaust, well, so what? In a different context - Darfur, say - they would be praised for their sensitivity. I would imagine - I certainly hope - that non-Jews who were mobilized to oppose Saddam were motivated by his record of genocide as well. But put aside genocide: I tend to believe, and the record bears this out, that men like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith had five or six or seven different motivations in this war, just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did, as well.

This doesn't absolve the Jews in the Bush Administration of incompetence and negligence, but it doesn't absolve the non-Jews either, especially because, and I know Joe doesn't want to hear this, the Jews were not quite the all-powerful figures in the White House and Pentagon that people imagine them to have been.

But this brings me to a deeper question: Why is it illegitimate for American Jews to care about Israel's security and argue for American measures that would strengthen Israel's security? In a conversation earlier this year, Joe told me the following: "I just don't want to see policy makers who make decisions on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not."

Why not? American policy makers make decisions that benefit other countries all the time. American troops are in harm's way in South Korea and Japan, serving as tripwires against North Korean aggression. American troops are in Western Europe, in Kosovo, and dozens of other places, all with the aim of providing security to friends and allies. American troops died liberating Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia, and those who argued for the first Gulf War were seldom accused of putting Kuwait's interests before America's. So why, exactly, shouldn't American policy makers consider the security of Israel, an American ally, when they're making decisions about Middle East policy? Support for Israel is a question that's worth debating, of course, just as support for Egypt and Kuwait and South Korea and a dozen other countries around the world is worth debating. But this country has been committed in a most bipartisan way to Israel's security for more than sixty years. Now Joe Klein comes along and suggests that American decisions should be made without consideration for Israel, and he argues that those who take Israel's security into account when making decisions - at least those Jews who do - are somehow disloyal to the United States. (By the way, just so we're all clear here, I'm not arguing for or against the Iraq War now; I, for one, believe that the war has set back, among other things, Israel's security. I'm only talking about the rights of American Jews to participate in the formulation of American Middle East policy. Even stupid Jews.)

But let's come to the final issue, the question of ethnic "embarrassment." I find Joe a little bit unfathomable on this question, actually. I tend to be unembarrassed by the actions of other Jews. I don't feel that the idiocy or immorality of other Jews reflects negatively on me, just as the great achievements of other Jews don't really redound to my credit. I have a visceral distaste for cringing (this is the Zionist in me, I guess), because it's a very unflattering, very ghetto sort of Jewish behavior. It seems as if people like Joe, whose anger at a handful of Jews for advocating the Iraq War is so outsized (he seems to spend more energy attacking neo-conservative Jews than he does the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) are saying to the rest of the world, "Those Jews over there, the ones you don't like? Well, I don't like them either! In fact, I like them less than you like them! So just remember, I'm not them."

But here's the thing: The czar is dead. A little Jewish self-confidence wouldn't be a bad, or inappropriate, thing.

Cross-posted at the Atlantic.

Joe Klein is defending Rashid Khalidi from charges of anti-Semitism, and I, for one, am fine with that, as I'll explain in a moment. What I'm not fine with -- what I can't actually believe -- is this line from Joe's blog: 

 I've never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous.

I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not about to accuse Joe of being an anti-Semite, but I will note that this the first time I've ever heard a Jewish person, or a non-anti-Semite, make this sort of malicious statement, one that perverts the universal meaning of a term in order to mock the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. "Jew-hatred" is actually my preferred term, because, as I'm sure Joe knows, "anti-Semitism" was a term invented by the avant-garde Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr, who was the founder, in 1879, of the League of Anti-Semites, which argued that Germans and Jews were locked in a death struggle for racial superiority. And we know where that ended.
 
Since Marr's time, of course, the term has evolved from a compliment to an insult, but its meaning has held steady all these years. As I said, the only people who insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience, anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors. This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab. So, really, who's being fatuous?

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the  Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble. However, emptying the term "anti-Semitism" of its accepted meaning in order to score points against John McCain? That's simply too much.

But about Khalidi -- he's a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, of course, and in my conversations with him, and in his writing, I see that his sympathies frequently cause him to  distort Middle East history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me, that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to reach a compromise with it.

By the way, the term Rashid Khalidi uses, in speeches and in his books, to describe Jew-hatred? Anti-Semitism.   

Cross-posted from Goldberg's Atlantic blog. 

I've only watched the 12-minute version of "Obsession," the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or "Fire of the Torah," but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.

Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama's ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.

But I digress. It's said of Ronn Torossian that he represents "right-wing" Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. "Right-wing" is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.

Torossian's attitude toward Arabs and toward the peace process are echoed in the approach of Aish HaTorah, which is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism. Which is amusing, of course, because "Obsession" is meant to expose a particularly sterile, sexist and racist brand of Islam.

The tragedy of "Obsession" is not that it is wrong; the tragedy is that it takes a serious issue, and a serious threat -- that of Islamism -- and makes it into a cartoon. Its central argument is that the "Islamofascism" of today is not only the equivalent of Nazism, but worse than Nazism. This is quite a thing for a Jewish organization to argue. One of the featured speakers in "Obsession" is a self-described "former PLO terrorist" named Walid Shoebat, who argues on film that a "secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than Islamofascism is today."

This is lunacy, of course. Islamism isn't Nazism. It's bad enough without being labeled Nazism. Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, shows up in the film as well, and doesn't cover himself in glory: "History has an unfortunate habit of always repeating itself," he says. Always? Does this mean that the Arabs are right now constructing death camps for the Jewish citizens of Israel?

Just unbelievable, but the most unbelievable part of the "Obsession" campaign is its timing: What does this film have to do with Barack Obama? The film is meant to suggest that Obama will provide aid and comfort to Islamism, or is an Islamist himself. There is not one shred of proof on this planet that Barack Obama is anything other than an Israel-supporting Christian. Yes, he went to party with Rashid Khalidi. So did I. Does that make me a member of Hezbollah?

I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it "Obsession" as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy End-of-the-Holidays. I don't know what I'm looking forward to less -- two more weeks of this campaign, or taking down my sukkah. I have to get a better sukkah next year.

Before I get to McCain, let me acknowledge your perspicacity, as Bill O'Reilly would say: One of the things that's been missing from the debate over which candidate is better for Israel is the question, Which candidate will make America stronger? Because a strong America is a necessity for Israel. I think that the Israeli officials you speak with who suggest that Obama might actually strengthen America's standing in the world are on to something.

Your analysis of McCain's weaknesses, from an Israeli perspective, is spot-on, as well. It's abundantly clear that Israelis of all political denominations become quite frightened when their neo-conservative cousins (not that you have to be Jewish to be a neo-conservative, by the way) talk about exporting democracy to the Muslim world. If you don't mind me quoting myself, I'll repeat a story I told in the Atlantic earlier this year. In December of 2006, Natan Sharansky received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush, and the Israeli embassy held a celebration afterward. As Sharansky extolled the virtues of democracy to the assembled crowd, a senior Israeli security official whispered to me, "What a child." He explained: "It's not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan." Afterward, I spoke with Sharansky, and in his charmingly self-deprecating way, he told me the following: "After I came back from Washington once," he said, "I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, 'Mazel tov, Natan. You've convinced President Bush of something that doesn't exist.'"

This is a long way of saying that Israelis, in the main, will be relieved when America stops talking about Arab democracy. That said, I don't think John McCain is quite the neoconservative democracy warrior his enemies make him out to be. He is a more practical man, I think, than George W. Bush. But so, for that matter, is Barack Obama. I've looked for signs of incipient Carterism -- defined here as an overarching belief in the power of the talking cure when it comes to evil dictators -- in Obama's actions and statements and so far, I haven't found them. Which is not to say that might not overvalue negotiations when it comes to Iran; we just don't know. I could go on about McCain's views of the Middle East -- where's he strong and where he's not (I do think that, unlike Obama -- thank you, Joe Biden -- America's enemies might not be so eager to test McCain, in part because they might be under the impression that he's crazy) but, today at least, the McCain campaign has a posthumous feel to it, and so I'm thinking more about Obama.

And so, to address your final point: Is it good for Obama to talk about Israel all the time? Yes. I agree with you, but for a slightly different reason. When I interviewed Obama on this subject, he said that one of the jobs of an American president is to hold up a mirror to Israel to show it where it might do better. This was his very polite way of suggesting that he wants to help Israel find a way out of the territories. The key, of course, is for Israelis to feel that a friend is holding up that mirror, not an enemy. Obama is trying very hard to show himself to be that friend.

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.]

Dear Jeffrey,

Since I'm on my way back to the east coast, where I'll spend the next two and a half weeks -- watching election returns somewhere in Ohio or Florida -- I'll soon also have an opportunity to de-sharpen those re-sharpened edges. Or maybe the sharper the better?

I guess our discussion can only move forward if we somewhat abandon our initial topic (why Israel should not be mentioned as mach) and try different angles with which to entertain our Jewcy readers. You asked about Israeli government officials, so I'll start with them, and generally speaking, I think these can be divided into three main groups.

A. Those supporting Obama for a while now. They include Democratic-leaning Israeli officials -- most supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton's and switching to Obama, few supporting Obama from the start. These officials generally believe that a Democrat will make America stronger - hence, will benefit Israel. Some also believe that Obama will get involved in the Israel-Arab peace process and help advance it in ways that Bush could or would not. The more realistic among them think this is mostly true for the Syria-track. There's a fair number of Israelis unhappy with Bush's tendency to oppose -- or not to encourage -- an Israeli Syrian dialogue. Anyway - these pro-Obama supporters consist the smallest of the three groups I was mentioning.

B. The second group will be the one of late-comers to the Obama cause. These people, I suspect, will grow in number as long as the polls show an apparent Obama victory (if they do). It is the international manifestation of the band-wagon effect: essentially, Israelis understand that Obama is going to win, so they might as well try to see the benefits and advantages of such candidate. Talking to the members of this group is pretty funny because one can easily detect the ways with which they try to rationalize an argument they aren't comfortable with. If polls, or atmosphere somehow changes -- these people will rush back to the group where they originally belong: McCain supporters.

C. This is basically the B group without the pretense, and its rapidly shrinking (Israelis, to they credit, were always very practical in nature). It consists of people who rather have McCain as the American president and are still willing to say it.

Their arguments -- and the argument of most knowledgeable Israelis supporting the experienced battle-tested McCain over Obama -- are quite clear: they want a president who understands the need to use power, and does not entertain the illusion that with charismatic personality one can change the Middle East (related to this topic, I really recommend that people will read your Atlantic piece on McCain and the use of power). In some ways, what they fear in Obama is the repetition of Bush the democracy-promoter. It's true that most Israelis think Bush was a friendly president, but readers should realise that very few of them really bought into the lets-democratize-the-region notion. Too realistic to believe, or too racist (Ariel Sharon famously said "after all, it is Arabs we are talking about here"), or too experienced -- Israelis liked the part of Bush that was supportive of security concerns, and vehement in fighting terror, but didn't as much appreciate his desire to transform the Mideast. Not that they don't want it -- they just don't think it's possible. Not now, not this way.

Surprisingly, what some of them see in Obama is a different kind of the same naivete. How's that for a surprisingly refreshing point of view?

Now back to the original topic of this exchange: does mentioning Israel helps Obama with Israelis? it really does. If one tries to find the positive aspects to this constant attention the country is getting, it is the fact that Israelis do feel now much more comfortable with Obama than they did a year or half a year ago.

I'll leave you the benefit of starting the discussion of McCain and Israel.

Best,
Rosner

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter, to which the following is a reply, can be read here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy New Year, first of all. It's nice to read you again; the Ha'aretz site is a barren place without you. And you seem even more blunt than usual; I suppose this has to do with your return to Israel. Your re-aliyah will inevitably re-sharpen your edges.
I'm of two minds about even having this dialogue, because I do tend to think, as you do, that Israel is mentioned far too often in presidential debates. On the other hand, who doesn't like to be the center of attention? We Jews have gotten used to this over the past 3,000 years or so.

Let me wrestle with two of your points. You write of Israelis, "The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence." I think you're a bit too harsh on your countrymen. It's natural, and inevitable, that Israelis would worry about the possibly-shifting feelings of their great benefactor. Jewish history, if nothing else, makes this natural, though I don't think this behavior is unusual at all for any country that is essentially a client state. This insecurity does have unpleasant manifestations, of course – loyalty tests, for one thing, and a weakness for victimology.

The Yad Vashem-to-Sderot Express, which all foreign dignitaries are forced to ride upon their arrival in Israel – "Look what they did to us!" meets "Look what they're doing to us!" – is a particularly unpleasant manifestation of this. Just ask Barack Obama, who would have probably enjoyed a visit to brash, positive modern Israel.
But to your main question: I think that most Jews who oppose the rise of Obama are opposing him for reasons other than Israel.

Yes, there are actual, ideologically-Republican Jews out there; and yes, I suppose there are Jews, primarily in Flatbush, who believe that John McCain will defend the Jewish claim to Greater Jerusalem (which is a terribly important cause when you live in Brooklyn, apparently) with greater fervor than would Barack Obama. But in my own experience, I would have to say that simple racism motivates much of the anti-Obama anxiety in corners of the Jewish community. I don't know what else explains it.

His positions on most matters related to Israel are indistinguishable from those of AIPAC. This anti-Obama feeling is, of course, disappointing, but not altogether astonishing. A black president with a strange name elicits the same fears among Jews in New York and Florida that it does among Protestants in West Virginia. That said, I assume there are fence-sitters out there who are comforted to learn that Obama doesn't actually hate Jews (and is, in fact, very nearly surrounded by Jews) so it does seem useful for Obama, and his surrogates, to remind Jews that he is a something of a Zionist fellow-traveler. In fact, this latest Jesse Jackson episode provides a good opening for the delivery of just such a message.

We'll get to McCain later, I hope. For now, I'm curious to hear you on what Israeli government officials actually think of Obama. Do they really believe that he is in some way hostile to their interests?

Best,
Jeff

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

Rosner's response to this letter will follow shortly.

Both Shmuel Rosner and Jeffrey Goldberg have written recently of the need for American national candidates to stop gibbering on about Israel. "The goal of Zionism is normalcy, Jewish normalcy," Goldberg noted last week on his Atlantic blog. "This, of course, is an oxymoron, but we can still hope. The cause is not helped when presidential candidates, well-meaning though they might be, constantly invoke the existential dangers to Israel when arguing for a) getting out of Iraq; b) staying in Iraq; c) talking to Iran; or d) bombing Iran." For his part, Rosner pointed out in a long-form essay for Slate that in the Palin-Biden debate, Israel was mentioned a total of 17 times, outstripping by far references to more pressing foreign policy concerns for the U.S. (China, Russia, Europe). It's not in either country's interest to overemphasize a relationship that, however "sacrosanct" (to borrow Barack Obama's word for it), is by no means exclusive.

Jewcy invited Goldberg and Rosner to discuss their mutual fantasy of minimal Israel chatter in an ongoing email dialogue. Below is Rosner's opening salvo; Goldberg's reply will be posted later today.

Dear Jeffrey,

I'll start by repeating the core argument I was making in Slate. It was not about the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, or the reasons such alliance is desirable (for both countries). My complaint was about the frequency with which presidential candidates mention Israel. I think this hurts Israel because it presents is as a country that is more trouble than an asset to America. I also think that it distorts the voters' perception of American foreign policy. Israel is important, and is located in an important region. But mentioning Israel more than Chine, Russia, the European Union and its leaders (Germany, France, Britain) gives the wrong impression about the real interests and the real motives for numerous US policy decisions.

The question for this email exchange, though, is how do we make it interesting for readers. If we both agree that Israel's name should come up in the election with less frequency, the only way for us to have a debate is if we have some disagreements regarding the reasons for which we want it off the radar screen. My argument is fairly straight forward: it hurts Israel. It's not about "normalcy" (as you briefly argue in the blog item you wrote about this topic) -- it's about interests. I don't think the candidates really serve Israel's interest when they talk about it. And since both of they claim -- and I believe it to be right -- to be staunch supporters of Israel, their actions contradict their intentions. As we both know, this is probably happening mainly because of politics. The candidates think that they need to keep saying how much they love Israel in order for people --mostly Jewish -- to feel comfortable with them and to support them.

I find it to be both ignorant and insulting: most American Jews care for Israel but are not one-issue voters. They might not vote for a candidate that is openly hostile to Israel, but will hardly make the nuances of Israel-related policies the definite reason for which to vote or not vote for specific candidates. If there's a litmus test, both McCain and Obama have passed it a very long time ago. This does not mean that their different approaches to Middle East policies have no significance as far as Israel is concerned. It does mean that they can stop using Israel by way of explaining why staying/leaving Iraq is the right way to go, or why talking/bombing Iran will be the appropriate policy for the U.S. to pursue.

As I wrote in my Slate piece, I think Israelis should also grow up and stop drooling whenever a debate is moving in Israel's direction. The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence. In the case of Israel, self-confidence in not just a quality that's more appealing, it is also a matter of national security. If Israelis need this constant approval, it means that they aren't sure about the US' support. If they aren't sure, their enemies might be convinced that it's really something they can further erode by pursuing more aggressive policies.

But let me ask you this Jeffrey: Is it Israel that makes Jewish voters uncomfortable about Barack Obama? you've written a lot about Obama and the Jews (as I did too), and you seem to think that something else is at play here - dare we say racism? and if that's the case, can Obama overcome such weariness by talking more about Israel? And what about McCain: can he really convince Jewish voters to vote for him by convincing them that Obama's policies will endanger Israel - or is he really going to scare Americans voters who might think that he is going to war with Iran because of Israel?

A lot to talk about, and so little time.

Best,
Shmuel

Jeffrey Goldberg's reply can be read here.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War."  I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a bottle."  The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments ­that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.

JG: The most astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis simply got tired of the killing?

DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.

What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.

In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, ­where everyone is related to everyone else, ­the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi ­Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.

Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes, grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The result is the calm you see today.

The Sunni Awakening, which began in Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked in.

JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?

DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this. But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.

JG: Is the average Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he was six years ago?

DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.

JG: Is Iraq a democracy?

DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.

JG: How do you, as an American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?

DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.

A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."

Let me just say: I left.

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]